A lost cause
by eiiiinsturzen
Summary: Angelika Einsturzen A/U


**A**_ngelika_ **E**_insturzen's_ **S**_tory_

Angelika Einsturzen was almost aborted. In retrospect, her mother thought, it would have been better. Her wet nurse would sometimes whisper - the woman's hands over the baby's ears as if she was capable of understanding it at all – that children don't always make it, that it's not uncommon for infants to die of mysterious causes. But the mother persevered, hoping that she could cultivate Angelika into something docile, something presentable. Ah, but it was always a lost cause. Angelika herself reflects on the effort sometimes, and she laughs into her hand when no one else is nearby.

When she was born, the midwife nearly forgot to test the baby's cry. She wiped it clean of blood and afterbirth, cut the umbilical cord and wrapped it in a blanket. 'A baby girl,' she said, but her voice was weak. The mother asked, 'Healthy?' and the midwife paused. She pulled back the blanket and peered at the child's fingers, counting them. Twelve altogether, longer than they should have been, thinned and tapered down to a needle-like point. But polydactyly wasn't the worst of what could have happened. After all, doesn't inbreeding usually cause birth defects? The baby could have been born without a brain, born with its organs on the outside of its body, born with its face missing – and so the mother was grateful, at least in the beginning.

These days, she doesn't celebrate her birthday. If someone were to ask, she would tell them that it's because she doesn't want to admit being older than thirty, but that's nothing but a coy deflection. The reason is because when she was younger, birthdays were days on which she allowed herself to fully indulge her cruelty in a fit of childish selfishness. (Since the Cerberus Project has been conceived, though, her playground has known no bounds.) Every December 24th for forty-two years has been a milestone of sorts, another bullet point to add to the list of her achievements.

On her fourteenth birthday, her parents bought her a dog. It was a Pomeranian, a little lapdog, because her psychiatrist had said that children who had problems empathizing with other humans could often communicate better with animals than with their peers. For a while, it was a textbook success story: she smiled more, she laughed more, and she thanked her parents for the companion. A month after her birthday, her father found the dog's legs severed and its carcass stuffed into the toilet, blood and fur seeping out from under the lid. It wasn't long afterward that she was sent to a pleasant boarding school on a campus with sun and green trees. She wrote to her parents every month telling them how much she enjoyed it, how kind her peers were, how interesting she found the classes.

Even her idiot mother knew the letters were lies; she hated her classmates as much as she hated the rest of the world, and she knew everything the professors could have taught her. But her parents were afraid. No, anyone who wasn't a sniveling idiot was afraid. Faking pleasantries was nothing but a tactic to keep the fear at bay. Her mother and father would watch her sitting in the parlor, and they would turn to each other and whisper, 'what should we do? What should we do?' And just like everyone who crossed her path (everyone until Haine), they bowed to her demands.

A week before she turned seventeen, she took a younger boy to the gazebo behind their dormitories, and she took his face in her hands and kissed him – and on the night of her birthday, she invited him into the empty common room. She whispered that she wanted him, and then offered him a glass of wine that she had spiked with a sedative, and when he was unconscious, she slid his arms into the oven and then slammed the door. It was a good present, she thought: the sound of bones cracking, skin tearing. She would have liked it better, though, if she could have heard him scream - but either way, the night was pleasant, and after she had removed one of his molars (a souvenir, she called it), she dragged him outside and laid him face down on the lawn in front of his dormitory. He knew she did it, of course, but nobody else did, and nobody else would. Sometimes during school assemblies she'd meet his eyes and smile, or she would pass him in the hallway and ask him, 'How are your wrists?'

Sometimes, she would take Giovanni's wrists into her hands, run her twelve fingers over the milky flesh, kiss the pulses that beat inside them, and she would imagine how good it would feel to snap them. So on her thirty-sixth birthday, she called the boy into her office, and she told him to hold out his arms. He did as he was told. She repeated what she had always done – touched them, kissed them – and then she took his left wrist in both hands and snapped the bones like dry twigs. He cried, but he didn't scream. Again, she thought she would have liked it better if she could have heard him. …But she had so much already. There's no use in being greedy, she told herself.

In truth, it wasn't just the boy's wrists that fascinated her. His fingers did as well. They were thin but they were normal; his nails were neatly trimmed and the skin was properly exfoliated. On each hand he had five fingers. She would sometimes press his palm against hers, but she couldn't do it for long. It sickened her how much longer her fingers were, how much thinner, how much sharper and bonier. How there was always one finger that didn't come to rest against Giovanni's duplicate.

On her tenth birthday, she scrubbed clean a meat cleaver and then laid out her left hand on the kitchen table. She raised the cleaver in her right hand and then she closed her eyes and swung. The scar in the table was nearly an inch deep. Her sixth finger, though, was unharmed. 'You should have them removed,' she remembers hearing her nurse murmur, late at night when she was supposed to be asleep. She doesn't remember what her mother said, after that. She doesn't remember her mother saying 'I don't want you here. I don't want you here. Get out.' She doesn't remember her father asking her mother: 'do you really believe something so defective deserves to exist at all?' No, she doesn't remember it, but she understands it. Angelika Einsturzen was almost aborted; what's important is that she was not. Like a tumor allowed to grow, like a disease allowed to spread – ah, but it was always a lost cause.


End file.
